


Three Iterations of a Birth (and Death)

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:33:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: This is a series of three retellings of the ending of season 8 (in my never-ending quest to tell every possible version of that arc). The first one is awful, and the only version with character death. Then each iteration is lighter than the previous.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 1
Kudos: 41





	1. Tragedy

In his mind there was a logic of risk and reward. There had always been the wild drive toward action over affect, a sword torn through the world rather than the quiet sensing of its dark places. Fight, chase, pursue. Do not think about what is happening in the hospital bed. Act, don’t feel.

Once upon a time, Melissa Scully had chastised him for this avoidance while standing in his darkened foyer. He had heard her and, out of guilt, obeyed. He had gone to that quiet room and touched Dana’s cool fingers and shoved down his compulsion to run long enough to offer her a handful of words before she died. After Melissa was gone, no one held him accountable in that way again. Sometimes Scully’s eyes would seem to whisper _please stay_ , but these words she never voiced aloud. He found it all too easy to turn his gaze from the pleading. Elsewhere there were answers, were possible miracle cures, were men who might be intimidated or punished.

His risk had always yielded reward. Answers about her stolen ova, a cure for cancer, a green vial (unwanted) for her dying child. She was still alive, wasn’t she? And by his side, no less.

“I won’t let you go alone,” she’d said to him before the final trip to Bellefleur. The truth they both knew was that she could not have made him stay. Risk and reward. He might have realized his luck had run out, to be put through this grave (ha ha) adventure. But he was still here. _You act as though you’re surprised_ , his flippant comment, despite the years-old ache on her face. He refused to look at her wet eyes. He cut her off when she tried to explain. There were government buildings to break into, secrets to know. He would look anywhere but at the suffering.

How stupid, how arrogant. He’d felt the moon and stars bend their arc around his presence, the gods smirking at his antics, fate shaking its head and laughing. _You’re not prince Hamlet_ , the old man had said once. He’d been right in that Fox Mulder was no lynchpin of mythic story, but this was a tragedy nonetheless.

He’d put her in that car never thinking—

_Stop_.

His ears buzzed and there was constriction in his chest as if someone were pressing weight onto it. The room around him was as close to sensory deprivation as one could get: oatmeal grey walls, dim light for his unpredictable pupils, and silence. A darker dim was the only way he knew it was night. Too bad he could pull at his restraints and feel his own wrists. Too bad he could smell himself, like sweat and the oil from his skin and desperation. All the suffering he’d ever looked away from, he paid for now. He was forced to feel its infinite redoubling in this room where he could look nowhere but at his own deserved misery. It was not guilt he felt, but a murderous rage toward himself. Every flare of anger he’d turned on serial killers or complicit men of the shadow conspiracy—this anger swallowed it all, crunched it beneath the Goliath boot of self-hatred.

Over and over he watched in his mind that desperate look on her face ( _please stay_ ) as he practically shoved her into a stranger’s rental car without a single word of either regret or love. Their separation was his sacrifice, his payment for the truth and her safety. He had monsters to slay and answers to find. No time for hospitals ( _she’d been alright, not poisoned_ ) or ba—

No.

The record rips to a halt again but the ghost scent of blood hovers in his nostrils. The sight of Monica Reyes beaten and unconscious on the floor of a Georgia cabin flashes in his mind. Any outcome but their tearful reunion was unfathomable. This was his story and she was meant to be in it. He’d taken the risk; he deserved the reward.

In truth the universe kept no balance sheet, least of all in the currency of his faux bravery. She was not his destined companion and he had not forged their promised future with his quest.

In that dirt-road town he’d seen a string of glassy-eyed automatons, but none were carrying the bundle of his child. As he approached its gaping doorway, no infant cries came from the cabin either. It was quiet like death and smelled that way too.

“Sc—“ he couldn’t finish her name when he stepped inside. This was a hallowed place. Or cursed. Monica was a crumpled ball of limbs on the floor, Dana a red pile of rags on the bed. His legs would not move him. A small camp lantern and four candles—that’s all the light she’d had in the place she’d been made to give birth.

He tried to turn the image off, to make his mind’s eye look away, but could not. This was his torment now. Every morning on waking and in his dreams too: the bone white of her shoulder, her cheek, in that mountain of red. The helicopter pilot had found him there some minutes later: dead-eyed and staring, slumped on the floor before her. Through the sea-crash waves of blood in his ears and his own internal denials, he heard the man’s _Oh Jesus fuck_ s and his panicked rush back to the chopper to radio for help. It took four men to get Mulder out.

Much later, when Monica was able to talk, the only thing she’d said about it was, “One of them was impatient. He wouldn’t… it wouldn’t wait.”

Mulder could not think what unspeakable things that meant for his partner. The word gutted him. _Partner_. Is that what he had been? What kind of man puts his _partner_ , let alone his—

The black wave came, dragging him under. When his mind got too full, it made him sleep and he was sometimes grateful and sometimes angrier for it. _Don’t make me see_. But he deserved to look at what he’d done.

There’d been no infant in the cabin.

There’d been two broken women, one alive.

Against his will, he slept.


	2. Epiphany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After William’s traumatic birth, a terrified Scully withdraws from Mulder.

Somewhere in this chain of events, Mulder had made some miscalculation. Rising threat put her in danger, and so he sent her away. If he could get her far from these monsters, from him, she might be okay. But then there had been the sea of headlights, too far from the highway, too near his destination to be anything but Them. From the air it had seemed a star or beacon. A light, he could say: he’d followed a light.

But to what?

The stink of blood was still in his nose. He’d held them. He’d held them both. Such tiny fingers reaching up and out of the blanket on her chest and he’d leaned forward to let them brush his nose. A clenching in his heart.

Soft words tried to come from her lips. “Mul… didn’t…”

He held her tighter and pressed his face to her hair. “They didn’t take him. He’s here. You’re here.”

She frowned and shook her head _no_. “You didn’t…” but it was too much for her and she drifted under again. He willed the pilot to fly faster. The sheet he’d wrapped around her was becoming damp and tacky with blood along its underside.

On the hospital’s helipad there was a frenzy of scrubbed healthcare workers, a gurney appeared, and he tried to answer questions as best he could.

_Are you the husband?_

He winced and ached. Mother and child were separated for treatment and he was kept from them both, shuffled to a blue plastic chair in some chilled waiting room in northern Georgia. Scully’s blood was on his jeans, dried and cracking on his fingertips. He recalled the small arm that reached from the blanket and he let his face fall into his hands.

—

In many years of his and Scully’s scuffles with rough-around-the-edges government mercenaries and violent semi-human teratological anomalies, Mulder had become well acquainted with pestering medical staff for information. He wasted no time getting to it now, but he realized something was wrong when their responses turned from annoyed to cold. No, they could not tell him about miss Scully’s condition, nor that of the child. No, he could not see her.

He had no FBI credentials to brandish at them and wore no wedding ring with which to legally pry. So he waited and paced and drank machine-processed coffee until he didn’t know what day it was.

Some eight or twelve cups later, he caught Monica Reyes at the vending machine and watched her stiffen when she saw him. He launched a barrage of questions at her. _Where is she? Is she okay? What happened to the baby? I need to see her!_ Frown lines deepened on her forehead.

“She won’t see you,” she said.

Mild panic, a wave of dread at her words. He wanted to believe it was sympathy he saw in her face, but it could have been only tiredness. Finally, he managed, “Why not?”

Monica’s eyes were like daggers before she turned away. “She’s traumatized.”

“But she’s okay?”

She shoved a quarter into the vending machine with too much force. “What part of _traumatized_ do you think is okay? She won’t sleep and won’t let go of the baby, not even to let her mother hold him.”

Mulder felt a jab in his heart. “Maggie’s here?”

The machine rumbled and a soda crashed to the bottom where Monica grabbed it. “She is. She doesn’t want to see you either.” With that, she gave him a look and walked back toward the room from which he’d been forbidden. He followed, but she halted quickly, one hand on the butt of her gun and the other held up to stop him. “No. She’s under FBI protection.”

“But I’m—“

Monica tilted her head, eyebrow raised, and his jaw hung open. He was what?

He was at a loss. Scully wouldn’t see him, wouldn’t let him see her, wouldn’t let him see the baby. Was there something wrong with it? Was the child sick? Was the child not a child?

His voice came out more ragged than he expected: “Is he okay? The baby?”

Her eyes softened, just a fraction. “Yeah. He’s fine.”

“I need to see them.”

But she shook her head, hand still on her gun, and left him behind.

—

“Mulder, I can’t help you. She told the staff not to let you in, and that’s her choice.”

“But _why_? Did she tell you why?”

There was a pause on the line and he could hear Skinner’s discomfort, his clenched jaw. “She’s afraid.”

“Of me?”

The sound was something like a sigh, half-choked. “Yes.”

Another long pause.

“She says you sent her to die.”

Mulder didn’t have any words after that, so he hung up.

—

He tried to imagine where he went wrong, where’d he fucked up first and hardest and most irredeemably. Going back to Oregon without her, maybe. He could have sensed then that something was wrong and changed everything. Little clues fell together in hindsight that, at the time, had felt only like encouragement: the sense of something huge—that he was onto something. He thought he’d been on the brink of real discovery, but it had turned out to be disaster.

It was re-entry, though, that he’d really fumbled. Driven by rage and confusion and this overwhelming sense of loss, he’d lashed out at the only person he felt he could really hurt. He’d been ripped away, and he came back to a different world. A different Scully. All he knew how to do was chase and fight, and he’d punished her for his lack of power. 

Alone, he sat in his darkened apartment, ruminating on what might have been. Three days he’d been sitting here, raging fruitlessly against his own solitude, replaying that last afternoon in Georgia. He pressed his fingers against his eyes like he could wipe the image away.

He’d stayed, despite the nurses’ warning, despite Skinner’s and Monica’s admonitions to go home. He couldn’t go until he’d seen her. Didn’t they understand that he _couldn’t_ without seeing her face? Their faces: hers and the child’s. And he had—though only for a moment. He’d paced the hallways, stubble growing into a rough beard, circles growing under his eyes hour after hour until he’d finally caught sight of the trio of women in the far hallway—Scully in a wheelchair pushed by an orderly, Maggie and Monica behind.

“Sc—“ the sound croaked from his throat. He cleared it and tried again. “Scully!”

The woman in the wheel chair started, turned—and he caught the horrified look on her face. She held a bundle in her arms, he saw, and at the sight of him she gripped it tighter. There was none of the gentle recognition he expected. There’d been no misunderstanding: she was afraid of him. Terror was written all across her face and body.

_No_ , he saw her mouth move. Her eyes were enormous, and almost in slow-motion he watched her try to lever herself out of the wheelchair, baby in arms. He watched her try to run, only to be held by the orderly, touched gently and comforted by her mother. (“Dana, it’s okay. You’re okay, he won’t take you anywhere.”)

Monica had turned in his direction, fury descending on her face as she stomped toward him. “Go!” She whisper-screamed, flinging her finger at him, shoving it at the exit behind him. “Get out of here! You’re scaring her!”

His chest filled with guilt and hot-lava shame. He’d wanted to call out to her again, wanted to say _It’s ME_ , but he could see her panic and could not stand to think that he would make it worse. He stumbled back, catching the wall for balance, and then turned and hurried out of the hospital.

—

Most nights he couldn’t help it: he called Maggie’s house in fits of helpless desperation, needing anything to tie him to her, even the sound of her mother’s voice on the answering machine. Always the result was the same: a click before the machine could even connect.

After a week, Maggie finally picked up, voice sharp. “Fox, you can’t call here. It upsets her so much. She shakes every time the phone rings.”

“Thank you for answering,” he croaked. “I need to—I’m so sorry. I thought maybe she’d let me talk to her.”

There was quiet for a moment, and some rustling fabric on the other line. Then Maggie sighed. “She’s not well. She’s not herself.”

Mulder nodded, fingers gripping his hair and pulling at the short strands. “Why is she so afraid? What does she think I’ll do?” He spoke softly, like he might spook her, too, like he really _was_ dangerous.

“She thinks you sent her to that place so those people would take the baby.” Maggie sighed. “She thinks you’ll send her away again… and that you don’t want her to keep him.”

He swallowed down fire and rubbed his unshaven face. He was looking rough, barely showered in the time since he’d driven home in a daze with his eyes burning the whole way. He let Maggie’s words sink in: that Scully thought he wanted the baby taken away. That she no longer trusted him with her life.

“You know that’s not true, right? She matters more to me than anything. She’s my… I need her.”

“ _She_ needed _you_! You should have stayed with her!” Maggie hissed.

He almost sobbed, desperate now and sensing that Maggie was pulling away. “I know. I know. I just—please talk to her and explain that I love her. I need her,” he said again.

A cold silence seeped through the line for a long moment. “Your son needs her too,” Maggie said, and then she hung up on him.

—

Two days later a cardboard envelope came in the mail, addressed in Scully’s handwriting. His pulse tripled at the sight of her arced cursive—his heart, the whole thing, squeezed so hard he couldn’t breathe. He was ripping at the envelope, pulling out the printed pages. Inside were the results of a DNA paternity test: perfectly straightforward, perfectly clear. With almost exact accuracy, it revealed that he, Fox Mulder, was the father of this entirely human child. He stared at the page until the numbers blurred. _Probability of Paternity: 99.99%_. Maternal alleles were counted as well. Nothing abnormal. Two human parents and one human child.

Shaking, reading the numbers over and over, he almost didn’t see the note she’d made in the left-hand margin: _I ran these myself as soon as they’d let me into the lab. He’s yours. His name is William._

William. His son. Mulder didn’t make it back to his couch. He flopped down cross-legged in his foyer and let the paper slip from his hands. For two days he’d been haunted by Maggie’s words: _your son needs her too_. He knew everyone believed it already, had suspected and smirked and whispered about it for months, both before and after he returned. But he hadn’t allowed himself to believe such a thing could be true. His was a life of sacrifice and loss, near misses and furtive, stolen wins. No gift was ever without a price. This child could not have come into the world without some catch.

Yet here was the proof of this thing so simple. Here was his truth. Amongst of all their suffering—torture, abduction, disease, even death—they’d made something true and good. They’d loved each other, and from that had come an answered prayer. Yet he’d mistaken that answer for a curse, a trap. There was a tiny human in the world not because of cruelty, but because he’d finally let himself love. And from the moment he learned of this small life’s existence, he’d treated Scully like a bomb waiting to go off and reveal new deceptions.

He thought of her in that dark cabin in Georgia, screaming into the night, surrounded by strangers, bleeding into a filthy mattress. No wonder she was afraid of him.

It was long hours before he managed to get up.

—

Negotiations followed through Monica, whom he’d called in desperation: losing it, running on empty, a cracked shell. _Please tell her I need to make things right._

Finally a concession: “She says you can come by, but not inside.”

“But she’ll see me?”

“Only at a distance. She’s still… she’s really scared, Mulder.”

So he drove to Maggie’s house and stood on the lawn in the June dusk. He’d showered and shaved, but cut his face with his shaking hands. He’d held toilet paper to his cheek on the drive, feeling unhinged, feeling mad with the need to see them. Monica was there too: fully armed for protection, nodding to Dana that it was safe. Scully came to the first-floor window with William in her arms. She held the boy where Mulder could see, her lips pressed to the back of his down-fuzzy head. Mulder’s breath caught. His baby. He was so much bigger already than he’d been in that helicopter. He wore a white onesie, and chubby legs poked out from his cotton-covered diaper. On his feet were the smallest socks Mulder had ever seen.

Mulder took a step closer and Scully startled, but didn’t quite back away. He lifted his hand to show her his empty palm. A gesture: _It’s safe, you’re okay_. In his other hand he held a stuffed elephant. He lifted that too, and danced its soft and smiling body. The infant squirmed, and Scully kissed his head again, bounced him a little. Mulder’s eyes burned, red-rimmed and teary. He sniffed.

When Scully gave him a nervous half-smile and backed away, he placed the toy elephant on the porch for her—for his baby William.

And then he drove home.

—

Later, on the phone, she let him speak, let him hear her voice.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. He paced circles in his dark apartment.

“You didn’t believe he was yours. You didn’t want him.”

“I _do_ want him. Scully, I was so stupid. I didn’t know. I couldn’t believe.” He thought of those chubby legs and those little blue socks. He thought of kissing the fuzzy head like she had, of holding the small weight against his chest.

“Mulder, after everything… _you_ couldn’t believe?”

“I never thought—“ he sighed. “No miracle has ever come without a price for us, Scully.”

“He’s a baby, not a pawn. We made him and now he’s here.”

“And that’s not a miracle?”

“Not a calculated one.”

Mulder paused, remembering the small eyes and expressive face that had bobbed in front of the window, Scully’s haunted eyes that had watched him so carefully. “Not calculated, not planned, but still wanted.”

Now it was her turn to pause, to breathe deeply and work up the courage before uttering shaky words: “Why did you send me to that place? Why did you send me away?”

He stopped pacing in his bedroom doorway, dropped his head against the solid frame. His words sounded empty, even to himself, but they were the only justification he had. “I thought I was protecting you.”

“You always think that.”

“I know.”

“You weren’t.”

“I know.”

He heard another deep breath through the line. “I was so scared, Mulder. They could have killed me. They could have killed _him_. What would you have done? How could you let me go?”

His face crumpled and his heart thudded against his ribs when he thought of her dead in that place, of their soft infant harmed by alien hands. “I don’t know. I–” He squeezed his eyes shut and smacked his head against the doorframe again. “I’m so sorry. I’d never do it again. I’d never send you away.”

She was crying quietly on the other end of the line, but trying to hide it. “I have to go,” she said.

His impulse was to stop her, to keep her on the line because he was so desperate for her voice, for _her_. He opened his mouth to say _wait!_ , but thought better of it. He let her hang up.

“Bye, Scully,” he said when the line was dead.

–

It happened this way, that she’d let him call in the evenings. He would press the phone to his ear and close his eyes and pretend she was in the room with him. He listened to the baby fuss and asked questions: _how big? How much hair now?_ (The answer was always _almost none_ , and he would laugh.) _Does it hurt when you feed him? Can I get him anything? He’s going to be so smart._

“I miss you, Scully,” he told her, as he did every night. “What can I do? What else can I do?” He was feeling the phantom texture of her skin beneath his fingers, the line of her jaw in his palm. He wanted to smell her hair again and kiss the curve of her shoulder. He would settle for holding her hands, for pressing his lips to her knuckles, for a palm to the dip of her clothed back. He’d not been so long without her in years.

“Talking is good,” she said. “I like talking. I like hearing your voice.”

He swallowed. He needed more. “How can I see you again?”

She hesitated a moment. “I don’t know. I–” she breathed deep. “I need you not to pull away again. Not to run away.”

He thought nothing could drag him from her now, if she’d only let him in. “I won’t,” he said. “I promise.” He recalled his careless antics of the spring on the oil rig, in that Federal Statistics Center, and wondered what he’d really been chasing. Running from. He winced to remember. “I want to stay with you both.”

On the other end of the line he heard a small cry, heard rustling and the infant’s fussing grow louder as she picked him up, and then the baby quieted again.

“He looks like me,” Mulder said.

Rustling fabric again then a soft suckling sound as William ate. A sniffle–Scully’s. “Yeah.”

“Let me come in next time. Let me hold him. Show me what to do.”

A deep, wet sigh and then… “Okay.”

—

There were three strong women in the house but it might as well have been an army for the way their protective energy formed a fortress. He would never dare breach their trust. He was humbled in the inner sanctum.

Dana held William on the sofa. He was wrapped in a striped blanket and sleeping against her arm, jaw slack and lips wet. She didn’t move as Mulder approached, though her eyes were wide and worried, like he might grab the baby and bolt at any moment.

“You used to trust me,” he reminded her. He fidgeted with nerves, aching to touch them both. He took in the blue of her eyes and the roundness of her face, the way her hair lay on her shoulders now–still so perfect. Still his Scully. “Hi,” he said.

The smallest smile flickered on her face. “Hi,” she said. She loosened her grip on the infant and lifted him slightly so Mulder might take him. He bent and took the blanketed child into his own arms.

When he finally held his son, Mulder couldn’t help the tears that pressed at his eyes, that burned his nose and wetted his lashes. Here was this tiny person. Here was this whole life wrapped in gauzy cotton. This had never been a game with players and pawns, he realized, but he’d let Them make him believe it was. It had always been about this: small lives that were also huge, that were everything.

He sank down on the couch beside Scully, holding William to his chest. The small sleeping face wrinkled, grimaced, then blinked awake and yawned–such tiny, perfect lips. Then somehow his own eyes were looking up at him, searching his face. A miniscule hand reached out of the blanket to touch his nose, and Mulder kissed the unbearably soft palm. “Hey, buddy,” he whispered.

After a moment, Scully shifted closer. He felt her hand come up to touch his back like an absolution.

“I’ve missed you,” she said.

A fat tear rolled down his cheek and he could only nod at first. “Yeah.” He sniffed and wiped his face on his shoulder. “God, you’ve no idea, Scully.”

Her cheek came to rest on his bicep as she reached across to touch William’s head. The warmth of it, the weight of his child in his arms, were bringing him back to life.

“Stay with us,” she said, barely a whisper.

Mulder turned from looking at the baby to search her face. Her wide eyes yearned. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, then rested his head on hers. “Forever,” he said. “This is it.”


	3. Fantasy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This time he gets it right.

“Mulder, you should know something.”

She sat on his couch with hands on her round belly, wore a tank dress and complained of the heat. Her feet, white-sneakered, rested on his coffee table. He handed her a glass of water and sat beside her.

“What’s that?” He turned to her, elbow propped on the back of the couch and watched her sip. She’d been smiling for much of today, tucked beside him and flirting gently at Layla Harrison’s bedside, demanding they stop for Mexican food on their ride back from the hospital. He sensed, though, a seriousness in her tone now. A small fold appeared between her brows.

“Not long before we found you, I had a procedure done by doctors that I thought I couldn’t trust.” She glanced at him briefly. “An amniocentesis.” Her fingers twitched against the side of her sweating glass, and she leaned forward to set it on the table. When she struggled to reach, Mulder took it from her and placed it on a coaster. “Thank you,” she said.

He nodded, but his heart was pounding, his face stilled and pinched in that look of panic. “An amniocentesis?”

“Yeah,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I wanted to run a PCR on the baby.”

So it was time, then. He’d waited for this conversation, felt it hovering like a thundercloud around them for weeks while they tiptoed around every mention of her pregnancy. Mulder swallowed hard. “And did you?”

She hesitated, eyes fixed on her knees. “I didn’t run it myself.” He watched her fingers fidget at the apex of her belly.

“But someone did.”

“Yeah.”

Mulder felt like yelling, like plugging his ears or running into another room. He didn’t think he wanted to know this, but he was also desperate for the information. “And?”

Scully took a deep breath. “Entirely human,” she said, then lower so he almost couldn’t hear, “and yours.”

Mulder chewed at his bottom lip and stared at her hands, still grazing the taut fabric over her belly. His child. He thought of her holding that baby in Oregon, of tiny Matthew’s fuzz-covered head in San Diego. His mind touched on the thought of an infant in his own arms, then shied away. He’d already watched one child of hers sicken and die; neither of them could bear that again.

But she’d also said _entirely human_.

“The results were clear?”

“99.9%,” she said. “But like I said, I didn’t run it myself, and I was so scared.” Her eyes lifted to meet his now, and they were round, wet. “I wanted to believe it, but how could I be sure? How could I trust anyone, Mulder?”

He saw her small and afraid, facing months of uncertainty. He saw these same wide and tearful eyes wanting to believe the results of a PCR test. He saw how much she needed him to believe with her: that this was only a normal child and theirs alone. He reached out a hand to take hers and she squeezed it hard.

“Why would they lie about that?” He whispered. He ran a thumb over her tense knuckles while a tear slipped away from the corner of her eye to trail down the side of her face.

She shook her head. “What if they want me complacent? What if they’re in the hospital when it’s time… when he’s born?”

_He_ again. Their son.

Scully was staring at the ceiling now, willing her tears back into her eyes, trying to steel herself against these possibilities, as she must have done for months. Mulder sensed there was more she wasn’t telling him, so he lifted her fingers to kiss them. “What changed? You said you _thought_ you couldn’t trust it, but you believe the test now?”

She held her breath for a moment’s hesitation before she whispered, “Yes.”

“Why?”

She looked at him. “I did another one. I mean I… I worked with my doctor and I ran the tests myself.”

“Scully.” Not quite chastising, but there was worry in his voice: a risky procedure, now run twice in an already complicated pregnancy. When had she done this?

“The results were the same.” There was something desperate in her eyes now. “He’s yours, Mulder.” Quickly she amended, “If you want him to be.”

—

It wasn’t because of what she’d told him, he thought, but because they’d finally talked about it at all. He kissed her on his couch and she clung to him, fierce and needy, arms tight around his back and face buried in his chest.

He pressed a palm to her belly between them and said, “Stay.”

She nodded, hot breath on his collarbone.

The earth and flower smell of her scalp under his nose made him think of their last night in Bellefleur: regret and sadness, but also the depth of love he’d felt while wrapped around her then. This, right now, was the _so much more_. Her body on his mattress, her cheek on his shoulder, marked the first time he thought to himself that maybe he was healing, that they both were.

Before she fell asleep she ran a finger down the center scar of his chest and whispered, “You said stay,” then kissed the thickened skin of it. “But Mulder _you_ need to stay.” Her eyes were two small pricks of light in the darkened room that spoke to him of a deep uncertainty, of real fear.

He gathered her whole self to him in both arms, knee hooked over her hip, and said, “I know.” He held his lips to the crown of her head and whispered, “Scully I’m not going anywhere.”

—

“You’re really sure?” She asked him, face in that half-crumpled furrow of disbelief. She wore maternity jeans and what must have been one of his own pilfered button-downs.

“Yes!” He said. “Now watch out!”

She stepped aside as he carried a cardboard box—seven books and roughly fifteen t-shirts (he wasn’t good at packing)—through her doorway.

It made sense. She had that second bedroom already.

—

A different night and very late, after two, he sensed her tension: a strained quickness to her breathing beside him. She was facing away, trying to hide it. Mulder curled his palm over her hip and asked low, “What is it?”

She stiffened. “I’m okay,” she said, but he knew her. He tapped two knuckles on her hip bone.

“Scully.”

A long sigh: a concession, an opening up because they were doing this right, now. “I’m worried.”

He nodded, careful. “About me?”

She shook her head and was quiet for a moment. Then, “I spent my whole life thinking medicine was good, that its whole purpose was to make lives better, safer, longer…” She shifted so her back pressed against his chest and he slipped his left arm fully around her. “But after everything we’ve seen, everything that’s happened to me… I just don’t know that I can trust doctors anymore.”

Mulder tucked his nose in that place between her neck and shoulder. They had taken her faith even in this, shucked her convictions in the good of medicine. The meddling hands of whatever forces they were up against reached down and out into every institution she’d once trusted. “Even your new doctor?”

She shrugged.

He let his hand slip down, covering as much of her round abdomen as he could. He loved touching her this way now, feeling the little knees and feet press outward, the subtle hiccups that came in the evenings. “What can we do?”

She covered his hand with her own and guided it to a place where some small limb pushed toward the outside world. He drew a small circle around it with his index finger and kissed her ear.

“What if we went away? Maybe…” She swallowed. “Maybe some little town in West Virginia or Ohio with a birth center? We could use different names and maybe my mom could come with us and we could just… disappear for a little bit? Until he’s born.”

“You’ve been thinking about this.”

“Since the first amnio. Since I realized Parenti was bad.” Her voice wavered—there were tears in it now. “I thought I’d have to do it alone.”

Mulder shook his head, heart breaking for her—that this was her secret, her worst fear. “You won’t be alone, Scully, I promise. We can do that. We can go. Let’s do that.”

—

In the mountains of West Virginia, a place called Willowdale that sounded beautiful and safe, they were Kate and Richard Mulvey for two and a half weeks. They made quiet preparations in a rented vacation cottage, paid for in cash to a widow named Ruth. Maggie took no pseudonym, put her name on nothing, and stayed with them in the second small bedroom. She was a steadying maternal presence bearing folded blankets and cloth diapers, years of accumulated knowledge, and endless gratitude for being asked to come.

Scully had been having little contractions off and on for days until, on a Sunday afternoon in late May, they gripped her hard, forcing her to bend over the kitchen table and bite her lips together. “Mulder,” she whimpered, voice high, and he was beside her in a second.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re ready. We’re ready,” he told them both, willing it to be true.

The birth center was small and quiet, more like a house, and it kept its medical secrets hidden: beeping machines inside cabinets, monitors and needles and IV bags tucked away in drawers and closets, just in case.

Their baby was born in what looked like a farmhouse bedroom: soft light and calm music, yellow flowers on the curtains. Maggie took photos and offered her daughter sips of water, encouraging smiles. Mulder, who had killed with his own hands, who had chased monsters through dark streets with a gun, felt a different kind of wild adrenaline now, watching his partner rock her hips to some rhythm he couldn’t know. It was the anxiety of powerlessness: _her_ body did this. It was she who had to make it happen. He could only wait and hold her hand.

There was a tub. Of course Scully wanted a tub. She sank into the warm water and groaned a sound older than time. When the intensity passed she said, “It feels good. The water feels good,” and then after that she couldn’t speak.

Blood in the water worried him, but the midwife assured him it was fine. “Your baby’s coming,” she said. In a mirror angled between Scully’s knees, he saw the baby’s head emerge.

Scully held him first, lifted him herself from her own body through the water and into her arms, sobbing with relief while he turned from purple to pink and the midwife helped her cover him in a blanket. When the umbilical cord went soft and white, Mulder, still dazed, still not quite believing, separated mother and child at last.

“That’s good,” the midwife said. “Now you can hold him.”

The infant, wrapped and red, was pressed into his arms so Dana could stand, pass the placenta, dry off. Mulder looked down at the impossible face of his son and realized that something, for once, had gone terribly right. They had done this. In spite of everything, he found himself part of a family.

“Let me see.” He heard Maggie’s voice and she was smiling. She took their picture, he with the baby—a nervous father’s first moments—and came to touch her grandchild. “He’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” Mulder croaked.

Scully appeared beside him in the terrycloth robe she’d brought from home, eyes wild with euphoric relief, smiling like he hadn’t seen in far too long. She put one hand on the baby’s head, the other on his shoulder. “You’re both here,” she sniffled.

Mulder, catching her euphoria, bent and kissed her hard and open-mouthed, right in front of her mother.

—

Back in their apartment ( _theirs_ now), the Gunmen brought gifts and marveled at the boy child who was ordinary, yet no less miraculous. Mulder showed him off, chest puffed out in fatherly pride. William, they called him, who weighed nearly ten pounds already and had no hair to speak of.

“You are one lucky sonofabitch,” Frohike told him, wiggling his fingers in front of the child’s eyes.

Luck was part of it, Mulder knew. Things could have been so different, both better and worse. There was a universe of infinite variations in path, in outcome, in seemingly fated misstep. _What if there was only one choice?_ Scully had asked him once, and he’d contemplated all the possible errors that might have held them apart. He wanted to believe it were fate or luck, but he knew there was also choice. He would need to choose this path, not just now, but every day. It seemed so clear, so easy.

Mulder kissed the invisible fuzz on William’s head and nodded. “More than lucky,” he said.

When the boys left, he bounced his son into the kitchen where Scully was pouring iced tea into two tall glasses. She smiled at them, bright as sunshine.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said to her. “You give this guy some lunch, and I’ll make some for you, hmm?”

Her smile widened and she reached her arms out for the baby, who fussed when he sensed an approaching meal. “Sounds good,” she told him, tugging already at the neckline of her shirt. “Get in there and make me a sandwich.”

Mulder laughed. He felt suddenly whole and warm, taken by a need to touch her. Before they were out of reach, he threw one arm around Scully’s shoulders and bent to kiss her neck: a noisy smack just below her ear. “Yes ma’am,” he murmured. He let her go and watched them settle on the couch.


End file.
